Once upon a time, baseball was a different sport. Players looked like ordinary guys; they didn't have heads like basketballs, and records weren't made to be broken, they were carved in marble.
So imagine the upset in 1961, when an average slugger named Roger Maris threatened the immortal Babe Ruth's single-season home run record. Maris, whose 73rd birthday we note today, hit 61 homers that year -- with nary a steroid or hormone in sight -- a feat which earned him scorn and an asterisk, when Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, bowing to baseball purists, declared that because Maris had seven more games than Ruth to accomplish his feat, it didn't count (more or less).
Maris never came close to replicating the feat (those 61 homers were nearly a quarter of his lifetime total), but he had a solid career, playing in seven World Series (winning three) before retiring.
The New York Yankees retired Maris's uniform number in 1984, a year before his death, and five years before Mark McGwire broke his record (under circumstances that now seem suspicious).
Even
McGwire's record was broken only three years later (under even
more suspect conditions),
but no one held the record longer or more humbly than Roger Maris.
Suggested Sites...
- Roger Maris.com - official site for the one-time record holder.
- Roger Maris Museum - the Pride of Fargo, North Dakota.
- The McGwire-Sosa home run chase helped make 1998 one of MLB's wildest seasons ever - ESPN details the epic season.
- Baseball Almanac: 61 Home Runs by Roger Maris - lists every home run hit by Maris that season.
- IMDb: 61* - Billy Crystal's movie about Maris chasing the record.
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